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this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2024
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That was such a frustrating article. Basically no information on why those metals (minerals?) are needed to manufacture chips and then you get to the end and find out that the U.S. gets half of them from China (but doesn't say where the other half comes from), and they just say that antimony is used in a wide range of products but not where it is also sourced from or how much is from China.
I assume this is not good news, but that was just not very helpful in explaining it.
More on gallium and its uses:
https://techiescientist.com/uses-of-gallium/
AP did not attempt to explain why all of these rare and exotic minerals and metals and compounds are used in manufacturing...
...because there a bunch of them, explaining all the reasons for using just one of them would basically be the equivalent of a crash course in applied chemistry / manufacturing / physics / engineering, and if you want to get into why these materials are used in lieu of others, well throw logistics and economics into that pile of course work as well.
AP is reporting the news, not being an industry specific journal, or a comprehensive policy impact study.
I agree with you that it was a frustrating read... but having worked as a copy editor, and having provided many different executive reports to various businesses and non profits, I also sympathize with the writer.
This is the kind of topic where you can either do a broad level overview, or you can write a tome for those who really want to dive into all the details to fully understand it... there's no effective way to do a middling approach on such a vast and complex topic.
Fair enough, that makes sense.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1445285/gallium-share-of-production-worldwide-by-country/
As of 2022, China basically produces all (98.4%) of the world's gallium.
... Statista has much more great info, but unless you want to pay for a subscription or spend a day hopping through proxy IPs... yeah, good luck.
The previous article says: "The largest global producers of gallium are Russia, Germany, Australia, and France. "
Ok, looking at this: https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/energie/china-seltene-metalle-100.html
I can see that the reason China became this huge producer is because everyone else decided to stop and by from them instead, though that doesn't mean they can only rely on China for it.
But indeed it is now the largest gallium and germanium producer.
And Gallium is combined to make late-factorio stuff, so him who controls the Gallium, controls the future.
That's how we're saying 'high-tech' now?
...fine, I dig it
They produce 98% percent of low-purity Gallium. We produce plenty of high purity Gallium, and Gallium, like Germanium, comes from Zinc mining. Which we still do plenty of in the US. So if we need more high quality Gallium, it's not going to be hard to get.
Ah, so it's not a matter of "that's where the gallium is", it's "might as well buy it from China if they're sellin' it", same as the dollar store
Edit: I wouldn't be surprised if the places in the US producing high-quality gallium are using poor-quality Chinese gallium as feedstock though.
They are, but we have plenty of Zinc mining we can get it from ourselves. It's just an economics matter, so we'd subsidize that. We only use enough to fill one truck load per year. So it's likely we'd just get a defense contractor to do it and subsidize it
I will add that this isn't really that huge of a deal:
https://cybernews.com/editorial/gallium-germanium-semiconductor-alternatives/
The US and any other developed country can produce it, they just choose not to since the demand isn't that economical to go out of your way to mass produce:
(From the article I linked)
Not enough for a business to specialize in the material. But, seeing as the US does produce a lot of zinc and aluminum and it can be refined as a byproduct of those materials, I won't be surprised if a company steps up to fill the gap after awhile.
Really, just read the article I linked. It gives a good rundown on all this plus the germanium. Ultimately, this isn't that big of a deal for the US.
That article isn't great in the way that it considers GaAs wafers separately, as if Chinese export controls won't touch GaAs wafers, whereas the Chinese announcement specifies anything that might be used by the US military industrial complex containing Ga may be targeted.
It doesn't consider them separately, the article I linked specifically mentions that the GaAs wafers would be impacted and presents a bigger impact. That doesn't take away the core point that China is the main producer because it's not that profitable. Other countries, including the US, can easily step in and begin refining Ga and Ge as necessary.
If it became an issue we would over pay Raytheon to refine it.
In my personal experience, even wholly within a professional domain when an expert is trying to give an overview to non-experts (for example to mid-level managers for the purpose of decision making) a lot of things end up having to be axioms (i.e. "trust me this is how it works/this is what's needed/this is how its done" as fully trying to explained things to them would requires explanations of the explanations of the explanations.
This is with same-industry expert-domain-adjacent professionals, so I can see how much worse it would be when explaining stuff to average whose understanding of an industry is zero.
Long story short, they're silicon doping agents that change the properties of semiconductors. China produces like 90% of these rare earth elements.
Gallium for example is used in the new smaller USB power supplies marketed as GaN gallium nitride, in this case used instead of silicon due to the better thermals at high power and smaller physical size.
I recognize gallium at least as a dopant material (what transforms the pure sillicon, which is an isolator, in the the n-side or the p-side of a semiconductor junction, where gallium specifically is used in light emitting junctions such as in LEDs) and a quick search showed that antimony is also a dopant.
(For the curious, here's the Wikipedia article)
As you might have noticed, even my short explanation of what a dopant is actually requires people to understand to an advanced level what semiconductors actually are made of, so I can see why an AP article which is targetting the average person wouldn't go into that specific rabit hole of explaining stuff that requires more stuff to be explained which in turn requires even more stuff to be explained and so on.
Also, I would be surprised if there are more than a handful of journalists in the World with even the most basic understanding of how semi-conductors work.
There is a fantastic video on YouTube about this, Veritasium I believe, the one about blue LEDs. I'll go looking, brb.
Edit: I have returned. https://youtu.be/AF8d72mA41M
I believe this is the video but I'm at work and can't watch it again right now.
Yep, that's the video you wanted.
https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/citations/ADA240992
Can't see more really.
Antimony applications
Antimony is a strategic critical mineral that is used in all manner of military applications, including the manufacture of armor piercing bullets, night vision goggles, infrared sensors, precision optics, laser sighting, explosive formulations, hardened lead for bullets and shrapnel, ammunition primers, tracer ammunition, nuclear weapons and production, tritium production, flares, military clothing, and communication equipment.
Hope that helps.
My takeaway is that since MILITARY INTEREST is involved, these materials will be exempt from the tariff.
It doesn't matter if there is a tariff on these materials or not when China refuses to sell them to the US.
People really don't understand what tariffs are.
Who do you think pockets the tariff? It would just be the government passing money from one hand to the other.
This is China banning the export of it's rare metals to the US. We're not even going to notice it. We have these available to us from other sources and domestic mining.
Antimony is rough, it's only found in China and Russia and it's critical to armor piercing rounds and all kinds of ammo. You can still make stuff without it but the ammo is inferior.
Antimony comes from Stibnite and is available in Europe and Canada. We're not running out of that any time soon.
It's a free, unclassified, pdf from a .mil. Treat it like an academic study and scroll to the conclusion. The takeaway is that unless we've let something slide since 1989 we produce enough Germanium for our own use and could scale it up properly in a large war scenario. And a quick check shows the companies they mention either still in operation or sold off in a bankruptcy and still in operation.
I'm not American nor am I commenting on what China's decision means.
I simply shared some info on what these are used for.
the AP has some weird style guides where they're supposed to put the newest info first and context last. it's good for reporting certain fast developing major stories, but for the intricate and mundane stuff that actually moves the world, they're kind of a disaster
They also skipped how production of these metals occurs, for Gallium for example, it's a byproduct of aluminum production. China became the main gallium (and later, LED) producer because they mandated (and sourced relevant equipment) for bauxite refining operations to harvest it, despite being non-economical to do so at the time, as part of a project that was consuming ~5% of their national budget in the late 80s.
America produces 1/36th of the aluminum China produces so even if Trump took the same step (I'm sure he could use the Defense Production Act or something), the numbers don't add up.
Others require the blighting of huge swaths of land and a lot of future work to prevent contamination of ground water (see West Virginia).
I don't believe America has the capacity to build local production with its current political system.
Thanks for the additional information.
I think antimony is what the last CEO of Intel used /s
If you don't get it antimony kinda looks like anti-money which would be like the opposite of money and intel lost a bunch of money recently.
Thank you, explaining a joke always makes it so much funnier.
Commenting on the joke's explanation explaining that it makes it funnier makes it even funnier
Even in tech circles, the financial health of a company and the removement of c-suite executives is still rather niche interests, hence the explanation.
Antimony? That thing I gotta pay the ex-wife?
per Wikipedia: Gallium is mostly used in cell phone production and higher frequency lasers (eg blueray, UV)
Gallium is a metal, the other 2 are metalloids (have both metallic and non-metallic properties). Anyway, they are semiconductor materials or used to create semiconductors ("doping" materials which means to introduce impurities to a often crystal-structure to influence the conductive properties) and you need them for basically everything in modern electronics. Widely used compounds are gallium arsenide (GaAs is used in many displays, LEDs and other light emitting stuff), Indium antimonide (InSb is often used in infrared cameras or imaging components), germanium is often used in solar panels.
I think Russia also exports them (which is why China has its eyes on Siberia where most of the natural resource wells for those materials are), so a full ban from China is bad news.
Medieval perspective: we trap lightning in magic rocks and make it think for us.